The larger-than-life exploits of Walter Patrick Lang—the Green Beret at the center of America’s covert conflicts from the Cold War to the War on Terror.

“One brigadier general compared Lang to Odysseus, Siegfried, Roland, and Beowulf. Some anecdotes called to mind the Dos Equis ads about the Most Interesting Man in the World. The King of Jordan held the car door for him, jungle tribesmen in Panama offered Lang their wives, the Pope assigned him to protect the tomb of Jesus.

Maybe none of that was true. Maybe all of it was. But by the Pentagon’s own account, Lang was the only man to bring Washington to full readiness before a war began.”

Army Colonel Walter Patrick Lang led the life that many men would love to live. He faced firefights on three continents and led a band of Pentagon ruffians stalked some of the world’s worst villains. When America was losing the War on Terror, he leveraged the lessons of his life to correct the course of his country. Yet only after the action, as the tape ran back, did he question the stories that both he and his nation were living.

A decorated combat officer, founder of West Point’s Arab Studies program, and senior Pentagon counterterrorist, he built target folders on famous names. Guevara, killed. Khomeini, contained. Gaddafi, chastened. Saddam, nudged toward the gallows by a hand he never saw. But his gifts were not always rewarded. He chose the Army over Harvard, then was spit on as he shipped out to Vietnam. The same maverick streak that drove his successes led to his downfall.

Informed by a decade of conversations with Lang and his colleagues, The Soldier Spy is not only an epic of wars and spies; it is a moral reckoning with the vanity of spreading freedom by force, an elegy for ideals of manhood that formed an extraordinary warrior, and a warning flare for all who will inherit and defend the American dream.